About Me

Saturday, 18 July 2015

Taking The Salute

The pictures
from 1933 of Her Majesty, along with her mother, sister Margaret Rose and
Edward, Prince of Wales, doing the Fuhrer's salute have been splashed all over
the media. My childhood was camera free for
which I am very grateful.

It was the
year when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and imposed one party rule of an
extreme form. So he was all over the
press and media. He was seen a copy cat
Benito Mussolini whose extravagant attitudes and gestures had already become
regarded as something of a comic turn in Britain.

In that year
the British Government were facing the question of defence spending. The turmoil in the world then posed threats,
not least in the East. But the public
wanted peace and in the East Fulham bye-election in October the pacifist Labour
Candidate won on a 29% swing from the Conservatives.

It is one of
the essential rules of life that one should be most careful in one's choice of
uncles. Errors of judgement can lead not
only to advice better avoided but embarrassments of many kinds. At the age of seven, like Her Majesty at that
age, an uncle of my father's caused all sorts of fraught ructions.

He was
strongly Presbyterian of Scottish origin and my error was to visit him shortly
before Christmas out of politeness and in the hope of a shilling or two in the
pocket. I did not get the money. What I did get was a firm, polite and
convincing explanation of why Christmas was a charade and falsity.

In particular
Santa Claus aka Father Christmas was a sinful and demeaning fraud that led to
greed, vanity, envy and sundry other sins.
On leaving he pressed a religious tract in my hand and told me go forth
and tell truths. Which inspired by his
nobility of manner and indeed sense of pawky humour I did to my cousins on the
other side of the family.

This group had
been building up to a big family Christmas with as much as they could afford
and at the centre for my many cousins was the whole Santa caper, which in my
sincerity of purpose I ruined. The wrath
of the aunts and other uncles fell upon me.

One indeed
telephoned a leading member of the local clergy to come to heap fire and
brimstone on my head and tell me to believe in Santa Claus. He demurred on the grounds that Christmas was
a busy time and that there were technical difficulties.

As uncles go,
Her Majesty is certainly to be criticised for having Edward. Prince of Wales as
an uncle. A man both given to be excited
easily and of indifferent judgement he was better avoided. Why, for example, did she not choose Lord
Reith or Lord Hardinge as uncles or even Stanley Baldwin?

In 1933, her
uncle was the heir to the throne. This
should have been enough to warn her.
Heirs to the throne are notoriously unreliable in matters involving the
media and latest fashions of one sort or another. Her Majesty herself made that mistake when
pictured in overalls attending to a three ton truck. She was holding the spanner the wrong way
round.

One of my
uncles was acquainted with Mrs. Wallis Simpson from his work on ocean
liners. He advised her on the advanced
techniques of shooting craps with dice, notably the skill of detecting loaded
dice and the knack of using them against the suppliers.She never managed to get Prince Edward to understand them. If he had he might have been King for a lot longer.